Land of free linked forever to its brave

While watching Olympic medalists stand motionless as the national anthem is played or while hearing the anthem sung before football games or Memorial Day services, we proudly join in the concluding phrase: for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

To quote M. Scott Peck in an anthology of wisdom titled “Abounding Grace,” most people think that courage is the absence of fear but it is not. “Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of your fear – in the very direction of which you are afraid,” he writes.

Mark Twain echoed that sentiment: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.”

We point to the obvious when describing bravery: physical courage in the midst of war or natural calamity; the courage of firefighters to race up the stairs of a burning building or rescuers to descend a cliff from which someone has fallen.

Peck, renowned for his writing on spiritual growth, says there is more than one kind of courage. “As I look at my nation,” he wrote in 2000, “I am generally impressed by the physical courage of its citizenry but distressed by the lack of intellectual or moral courage. I think this is important because most quotes about bravery refer to physical courage. Yet if my nation is to go down the tubes, I suspect it will be more because of a deficit in its intellectual bravery.”

So, we’re led to think about the “home of the brave” in an altogether different manner, focusing on the varied types and degrees of bravery, be they physical, intellectual or moral.

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

This quotation is from General Douglas MacArthur: “Last, but by no means least, courage – moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle – the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.”

As we sing those words of the national anthem and think about the continuing need for physical, intellectual and moral courage in our little and big towns and cities, our small and large states – our country – we find another quote in the anthology of wisdom that comes into a clearer light:

“This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.” – Elmer Davis.